The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  Ronald moved uneasily in his chair and his eyes wandered upward to the laurel-wreathed photograph of the pianist.

  “Is it the money, Ronald? Speak out, my boy. We’ll see, we’ll look round—I’ll manage somehow.”

  “No, no,” the young man interrupted, abruptly raising his hand as though to check his father.

  Mr. Grew recovered his cheerfulness. “Well, what’s the trouble then, if she’s willing?”

  Ronald shifted his position again and finally rose from his seat and wandered across the room.

  “Father,” he said, coming back, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you. I can’t take your money.”

  Mr. Grew sat speechless a moment, staring blankly at his son; then he emitted a laugh. “My money? What are you talking about? What’s this about my money? Why, it ain’t mine, Ronny; it’s all yours—every cent of it!”

  The young man met his tender look with a gesture of tragic refusal.

  “No, no, it’s not mine—not even in the sense you mean. Not in any sense. Can’t you understand my feeling so?”

  “Feeling so? I don’t know how you’re feeling. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you too proud to touch any money you haven’t earned? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “No. It’s not that. You must know—”

  Mr. Grew flushed to the rim of his bristling whiskers. “Know? Know what? Can’t you speak out?”

  Ronald hesitated, and the two faced each other for a long strained moment, during which Mr. Grew’s congested countenance grew gradually pale again.

  “What’s the meaning of this? Is it because you’ve done something...something you’re ashamed of...ashamed to tell me?” he gasped; and walking around the table he laid his hand gently on his son’s shoulder. “There’s nothing you can’t tell me, my boy.”

  “It’s not that. Why do you make it so hard for me?” Ronald broke out with passion. “You must have known this was sure to happen sooner or later.”

  “Happen? What was sure to hap—?” Mr. Grew’s question wavered on his lip and passed into a tremulous laugh. “Is it something I’ve done that you don’t approve of? Is it—is it the Buckle you’re ashamed of, Ronald Grew?”

  Ronald laughed too, impatiently. “The Buckle? No, I’m not ashamed of the Buckle; not any more than you are,” he returned with a flush. “But I’m ashamed of all I owe to it—all I owe to you—when—when—” He broke off and took a few distracted steps across the room. “You might make this easier for me,” he protested, turning back to his father.

  “Make what easier? I know less and less what you’re driving at,” Mr. Grew groaned.

  Ronald’s walk had once more brought him beneath the photograph on the wall. He lifted his head for a moment and looked at it; then he looked again at Mr. Grew.

  “Do you suppose I haven’t always known?”

  “Known—?”

  “Even before you gave me those letters at the time of my mother’s death—even before that, I suspected. I don’t know how it began...perhaps from little things you let drop...you and she...and resemblances that I couldn’t help seeing...in myself... How on earth could you suppose I shouldn’t guess? I always thought you gave me the letters as a way of telling me—”

  Mr. Grew rose slowly from his chair. “The letters? Do you mean Dolbrowski’s letters?”

  Ronald nodded with white lips. “You must remember giving them to me the day after the funeral.”

  Mr. Grew nodded back. “Of course. I wanted you to have everything your mother valued.”

  “Well—how could I help knowing after that?”

  “Knowing what?” Mr. Grew stood staring helplessly at his son. Suddenly his look caught at a clue that seemed to confront it with a deeper difficulty. “You thought—you thought those letters... Dolbrowski’s letters...you thought they meant...”

  “Oh, it wasn’t only the letters. There were so many other signs. My love of music—my—all my feelings about life...and art... And when you gave me the letters I thought you must mean me to know.”

  Mr. Grew had grown quiet. His lips were firm, and his small eyes looked out steadily from their creased lids.

  “To know that you were Fortuné Dolbrowski’s son?”

  Ronald made a mute sign of assent.

  “I see. And what did you intend to do?”

  “I meant to wait till I could earn my living, and then repay you...as far as I can ever repay you...for what you’d spent on me... But now that there’s a chance of my marrying...and that your generosity overwhelms me...I’m obliged to speak.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Grew again. He let himself down into his chair, looking steadily and not unkindly at the young man. “Sit down too, Ronald. Let’s talk.”

  Ronald made a protesting movement. “Is anything to be gained by it? You can’t change me—change what I feel. The reading of those letters transformed my whole life—I was a boy till then: they made a man of me. From that moment I understood myself.” He paused, and then looked up at Mr. Grew’s face. “Don’t imagine that I don’t appreciate your kindness—your extraordinary generosity. But I can’t go through life in disguise. And I want you to know that I have not won Daisy under false pretenses—”

  Mr. Grew started up with the first expletive Ronald had ever heard on his lips.

  “You damned young fool, you, you haven’t told her—?”

  Ronald raised his head with pride. “Oh, you don’t know her, sir! She thinks no worse of me for knowing my secret. She is above and beyond all such conventional prejudices. She’s proud of my parentage—” he straightened his slim young shoulders— “as I’m proud of it...yes, sir, proud of it...”

  Mr. Grew sank back into his seat with a dry laugh. “Well, you ought to be. You come of good stock. And you’re your father’s son, every inch of you!” He laughed again, as though the humor of the situation grew on him with its closer contemplation.

  “Yes, I’ve always felt that,” Ronald murmured, gravely.

  “Your father’s son, and no mistake.” Mr. Grew leaned forward. “You’re the son of as big a fool as yourself. And here he sits, Ronald Grew!”

  The young man’s color deepened to crimson; but his reply was checked by Mr. Grew’s decisive gesture. “Here he sits, with all your young nonsense still alive in him. Don’t you begin to see the likeness? If you don’t I’ll tell you the story of those letters.”

  Ronald stared. “What do you mean? Don’t they tell their own story?”

  “I supposed they did when I gave them to you; but you’ve given it a twist that needs straightening out.” Mr. Grew squared his elbows on the table, and looked at the young man across the gift-books and dyed pampas grass. “I wrote all the letters that Dolbrowski answered.”

  Ronald gave back his look in frowning perplexity. “You wrote them? I don’t understand. His letters are all addressed to my mother.”

  “Yes. And he thought he was corresponding with her.”

  “But my mother—what did she think?”

  Mr. Grew hesitated, puckering his thick lids. “Well, I guess she kinder thought it was a joke. Your mother didn’t think about things much.”

  Ronald continued to bend a puzzled frown on the question. “I don’t understand,” he reiterated.

  Mr. Grew cleared his throat with a nervous laugh. “Well, I don’t know as you ever will—quite. But this is the way it came about. I had a toughish time of it when I was young. Oh, I don’t mean so much the fight I had to put up to make my way—there was always plenty of fight in me. But inside of myself it was kinder lonesome. And the outside didn’t attract callers.” He laughed again, with an apologetic gesture toward his broad blinking face. “When I went round with the other young fellows I was always the forlorn hope—the one that had to eat the drumsticks and dance with the left-overs. As sure as there was a blighter at a picnic I had to swing her, and feed her, and drive her home. And all the time I was mad after all the things you’ve got—poetry and music a
nd all the joy-forever business. So there were the pair of us—my face and my imagination—chained together, and fighting, and hating each other like poison.

  “Then your mother came along and took pity on me. It sets up a gawky fellow to find a girl who ain’t ashamed to be seen walking with him Sundays. And I was grateful to your mother, and we got along first-rate. Only I couldn’t say things to her—and she couldn’t answer. Well—one day, a few months after we were married, Dolbrowski came to New York, and the whole place went wild about him. I’d never heard any good music, but I’d always had an inkling of what it must be like, though I couldn’t tell you to this day how I knew. Well, your mother read about him in the papers too, and she thought it’d be the swagger thing to go to New York and hear him play—so we went...I’ll never forget that evening. Your mother wasn’t easily stirred up—she never seemed to need to let off steam. But that night she seemed to understand the way I felt. And when we got back to the hotel she said to me: ‘I’d like to tell him how I feel. I’d like to sit right down and write to him.’

  “‘Would you?’ I said. ‘So would I.’

  “There was paper and pens there before us, and I pulled a sheet toward me, and began to write. ‘Is this what you’d like to say to him?’ I asked her when the letter was done. And she got pink and said: ‘I don’t understand it, but it’s lovely.’ And she copied it out and signed her name to it, and sent it.”

  Mr. Grew paused, and Ronald sat silent, with lowered eyes.

  “That’s how it began; and that’s where I thought it would end. But it didn’t, because Dolbrowski answered. His first letter was dated January 10, 1872. I guess you’ll find I’m correct. Well, I went back to hear him again, and I wrote him after the performance, and he answered again. And after that we kept it up for six months. Your mother always copied the letters and signed them. She seemed to think it was a kinder joke, and she was proud of his answering my letters. But she never went back to New York to hear him, though I saved up enough to give her the treat again. She was too lazy, and she let me go without her. I heard him three times in New York; and in the spring he came to Wingfield and played once at the Academy. Your mother was sick and couldn’t go; so I went alone. After the performance I meant to get one of the directors to take me in to see him; but when the time came, I just went back home and wrote to him instead. And the month after, before he went back to Europe, he sent your mother a last little note, and that picture hanging up there...”

  Mr. Grew paused again, and both men lifted their eyes to the photograph.

  “Is that all?” Ronald slowly asked.

  “That’s all—every bit of it,” said Mr. Grew.

  “And my mother—my mother never even spoke to Dolbrowski?”

  “Never. She never even saw him but that once in New York at his concert.”

  The blood crept again to Ronald’s face. “Are you sure of that, sir?” he asked in a trembling voice.

  “Sure as I am that I’m sitting here. Why, she was too lazy to look at his letters after the first novelty wore off. She copied the answers just to humor me—but she always said she couldn’t understand what we wrote.”

  “But how could you go on with such a correspondence? It’s incredible!”

  Mr. Grew looked at his son thoughtfully. “I suppose it is, to you. You’ve only had to put out your hand and get the things I was starving for—music, and good talk, and ideas. Those letters gave me all that. You’ve read them, and you know that Dolbrowski was not only a great musician but a great man. There was nothing beautiful he didn’t see, nothing fine he didn’t feel. For six months I breathed his air, and I’ve lived on it ever since. Do you begin to understand a little now?”

  “Yes—a little. But why write in my mother’s name? Why make it appear like a sentimental correspondence?”

  Mr. Grew reddened to his bald temples. “Why, I tell you it began that way, as a kinder joke. And when I saw that the first letter pleased and interested him, I was afraid to tell him—I couldn’t tell him. Do you suppose he’d gone on writing if he’d ever seen me, Ronny?”

  Ronald suddenly looked at him with new eyes. “But he must have thought your letters very beautiful—to go on as he did,” he broke out.

  “Well—I did my best,” said Mr. Grew modestly.

  Ronald pursued his idea. “Where are all your letters, I wonder? Weren’t they returned to you at his death?”

  Mr. Grew laughed. “Lord, no. I guess he had trunks and trunks full of better ones. I guess Queens and Empresses wrote to him.”

  “I should have liked to see your letters,” the young man insisted.

  “Well, they weren’t bad,” said Mr. Grew drily. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Ronny,” he added. Ronald raised his head with a quick glance, and Mr. Grew continued: “I’ll tell you where the best of those letters is—it’s in you. If it hadn’t been for that one look at life I couldn’t have made you what you are. Oh, I know you’ve done a good deal of your own making—but I’ve been there behind you all the time. And you’ll never know the work I’ve spared you and the time I’ve saved you. Fortuné Dolbrowski helped me do that. I never saw things in little again after I’d looked at ’em with him. And I tried to give you the big view from the start... So that’s what became of my letters.”

  Mr. Grew paused, and for a long time Ronald sat motionless, his elbows on the table, his face dropped on his hands.

  Suddenly Mr. Grew’s touch fell on his shoulder.

  “Look at here, Ronald Grew—do you want me to tell you how you’re feeling at this minute? Just a mite let down, after all, at the idea that you ain’t the romantic figure you’d got to think yourself... Well, that’s natural enough, too; but I’ll tell you what it proves. It proves you’re my son right enough, if any more proof was needed. For it’s just the kind of fool nonsense I used to feel at your age—and if there’s anybody here to laugh at it’s myself, and not you. And you can laugh at me just as much as you like...”

  FULL CIRCLE

  GEOFFREY Betton woke rather late—so late that the winter sunlight sliding across his bedroom carpet struck his eyes as he turned on the pillow.

  Strett, the valet, had been in, drawn the bath in the adjoining dressing-room, placed the crystal and silver cigarette-box at his side, put a match to the fire, and thrown open the windows to the bright morning air. It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the crisp morning noises—those piercing notes of the American thoroughfare that seem to take a sharper vibration from the clearness of the medium through which they pass.

  Betton raised himself languidly. That was the voice of Fifth Avenue below his windows. He remembered that, when he moved into his rooms eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him: the complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set. Now it filled him with disgust and weariness, since it had become the symbol of the hurry and noise of that new life. He had been far less hurried in the old days when he had to be up at seven, and down at the office sharp at nine. Now that he got up when he chose, and his life had no fixed framework of duties, the hours hunted him like a pack of blood-hounds.

  He dropped back on his pillow with a groan. Yes—not a year ago there had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed, feeling under his bare feet the softness of the warm red carpet, and entering the shining sanctuary where his great porcelain bath proffered its renovating flood. But then a year ago he could still call up the horror of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings: the listening for other bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in “crimping”-pins, the cold wait on the landing, the descent into a blotchy tin bath, and the effort to identify one’s soap and nail-brush among the promiscuous implements of ablution. That memory had faded now, and Betton saw only the dark hours to which his tiled temple of refreshment formed a kind of glittering antechamber. For after his bath came his breakfast, and on the breakfast tray his letters. His letters!

  He remembered—and that memory had not faded!—the thrill wi
th which, in the early days of his celebrity, he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand: the letter beginning: “I wonder if you’ll mind an unknown reader’s telling you all that your book has been to her?”

  Mind? Ye gods, he minded now! For more than a year after the publication of Diadems and Faggots the letters, the inane indiscriminate letters of commendation, of criticism, of interrogation, had poured in on him by every post. Hundreds of unknown readers had told him with unsparing detail all that his book had been to them. And the wonder of it was, when all was said and done, that it had really been so little—that when their thick broth of praise was strained through the author’s searching vanity there remained to him so small a sediment of definite specific understanding! No—it was always the same thing, over and over and over again—the same vague gush of adjectives, the same incorrigible tendency to estimate his effort according to each writer’s personal preferences, instead of regarding it as a work of art, a thing to be measured by fixed standards!

  He smiled to think how little, at first, he had felt the vanity of it all. He had found a savor even in the grosser evidences of popularity: the advertisements of his book, the daily shower of “clippings,” the sense that, when he entered a restaurant or a theater, people nudged each other and said “That’s Betton.” Yes, the publicity had been sweet to him—at first. He had been touched by the sympathy of his fellow-men: had thought indulgently of the world, as a better place than the failures and the dyspeptics would acknowledge. And then his success began to submerge him: he gasped under the thickening shower of letters. His admirers were really unappeasable. And they wanted him to do such ridiculous things—to give lectures, to head movements, to be tendered receptions, to speak at banquets, to address mothers, to plead for orphans, to go up in balloons, to lead the struggle for sterilized milk. They wanted his photograph for literary supplements, his autograph for charity bazaars, his name on committees, literary, educational, and social; above all, they wanted his opinion on everything: on Christianity, Buddhism, tight lacing, the drug habit, democratic government, female suffrage and love. Perhaps the chief benefit of this demand was his incidentally learning from it how few opinions he really had: the only one that remained with him was a rooted horror of all forms of correspondence. He had been unspeakably thankful when the letters began to fall off.